What’s fair? Societal structures, not human nature, teach us

By playing resource-dividing games with people from different societal …

Rousseau, Hobbes, and Locke all meditated on the development of social contracts that they considered necessary for people to operate in large societies. Game theory gives scientists a chance to test some of these ideas with hard data. By having people play anonymous games with money, researchers found that people from larger societies, ones that are more integrated into the market, are more likely to be fair in anonymous dealings; these same people are more willing to punish others when they are unfair. These findings suggest that fairness and punishment in dealings with strangers are largely learned behaviors, and that we need these norms and institutions to prevent our communities from fragmenting.

Before ten thousand years ago, localized groups probably had fairly limited contact with more distant human populations. Fast forward a few thousand years, and large, complex, and cooperative societies had become prevalent. Scientists have long been uncertain what facilitated the social changes that allowed people to feel comfortable trading with others they hardly knew.

Why should I be nice to you?

Some psychologists thought large societies are natural outgrowth of the sort of behavior people apply to kin and close friends. Extending this comfort to new acquaintances, adding them to a roster of trusted business partners, could help establish large, loosely connected networks. Another theory was that humans slowly established societal norms and agreements under which they could feel comfortable dealing with strangers—less natural to their psychology, but necessary.

The notion of fairness between two strangers is an interesting behavioral question—what motivates someone to be fair to someone they don't know? Small groups that know each other, like families, are motivated to be fair because they expect fairness in return. But in large scale groups, there are no reputation or reciprocation obligations between strangers.

Punishment can act as a means of enforcing fair behavior. While reputation damage is considered generally a serious enough punishment to keep people from exploiting others in small societies, it doesn't work fast enough in large ones. So, it can be equally important to know how we started punishing each other, and how it correlated with society size.

Hating the player: fairness and punishment in money games

To study these things, researchers sampled the attitudes of people from many different societies. Some were hunter-gatherers and foragers from less-developed regions that represent the small-tribe mentality, and others were from highly developed and industrialized countries.

Researchers gathered data on the community size, the religion of each person (Islam, Christianity, tribal/none, etc.), and their level of market integration, in this case a measure of how much food was obtained through the market versus what obtained by the person's own means, such as through farming or fishing. They also took data on wealth, education, and so on to groom out spurious variables.

Participants were tested with three games, all involving divisions of money via anonymous dealings that tested fairness and punishment. The first was the Dictator Game, which measures fairness. One player has to divide a sum of money between himself and another player—the more money he gave the other player, the fairer he was.

The second was the Ultimatum game, which added a small element of punishment. Again, the first player had a sum of money to divide between himself and another, but the second player could choose to reject the offer, causing both players to receive no money at all.

The third game, the Third-Party Punishment Game, involves three players. Again, the first player is dividing money between himself and second player, but this time a third player is getting a separate payment of half the total sum. The third player gets to see how much the first player offers the second, and can choose to spend some of his money to punish the first player by making him receive less money.

Loving the game: how society affects us

From the game data, scientists found that the type of community a person came from had a large influence on their behavior in these anonymous dealings. A person who was more integrated in a market community offered more money to others, showing that people more familiar with conduct in a large market are more likely to be fair to people they don't know. Participation in religion also corresponded with an increase in fairness.

On the punishment side, scientists measured the data in minimum acceptable offers, or how low an offer could get before a player would decide to punish the person making it. They found that the minimum acceptable offer increased with the size of the community that the punishing player belongs to (it eventually tapered off as in a natural logarithm plot). They found no relationship between market integration and punishment, although religious people were much more likely to punish other players.

Researchers think this data supports the notion that, as societies grow, more and more costly punishments are necessary to sustain them in order to prevent the group from breaking into smaller populations again. They also point out that that people from small, less integrated, and less religious societies are good analogs of our pre-large-society-forming selves, and that they are relatively unconcerned with either being fair to strangers or punishing them.

This calls into question the idea that social interactions in large societies stem entirely from an innate willingness to build up our Rolodexes and treat new strangers like old friends. According to this data, that willingness is heavily mediated by the establishment and internalizing of institutions and norms that handle rules of trade for us. While social contracts are, to a degree, natural (we did come up with them, after all) they are not habitual. The researchers caution that future behavioral studies should be careful about attributing these apparently learned behaviors to human nature.

32 Reader Comments

Great article, one of the reasons I love Ars. It isn't my scientific background, but proving how the golden rule came into play is interesting. I'm not sure how they conducted these tests on primitive societies. Or maybe they didn't, but the concept of numbers doesn't even exist in societies lacking modern education (numbers beyond the number of fingers or the concept of "many" or "more" that is), so playing a game with money would be a challenge in and of itself.

Fascinating stuff. Of course the results of the Ultimatum game are well documented (as you point out), but taking an established social experiment like this and applying it to different populations is really quite brilliant. While the conclusions drawn from the study are a bit too narrow given the evidence (in my opinion), it's nevertheless always interesting to explore questions of human nature.

Don't get "fairness" mixed up with "kindness". People are selfish by nature. Economics and gaming theory merely gives us a single score (money) by which to see how far folks will go in being selfish, and at what point they feel they have enough resources and will start being generous or less tight with their money. When folks are desperate, they are more likely to be unfair/selfish. But as they gain resources, they start being less stingy, and may even start giving away some of their resources if they felt it was for a good cause. This is different for each person. Some folks are never satisfied no matter how much they get, even when they own multi-billion dollar corporations. Then you get the poor guy who will give you the shirt off his back with a smile on his face, because he's perfectly happy as long as he has a warm bed and some food on the table.

Folks from small market economies are tighter in their close-knit units, and don't care as much about those they don't know. That's why micro-loans work so well...the stigma of being the 1 person in a small village who can't pay off debt keeps folks in line and paying off their debts. But the Nigerian guy in a small village spamming scam emails to strangers across the pond...he could care less about folks he's never met. But as society & market starts expanding and merging with others, it sort of normalizes how you treat others.

Certainly how one handles social interaction is likely to be affected by a history of experience in the consequences of behavior in some particular society. On the assumption that there is a genetic component to social behavior, it is likely that selection will operate in favor of behavior that works well in particular societies. Reliable experiments that distinguish between genetic components and purely cultural components are hard to imagine unless people with identical genes are raised in different cultures from birth.

If this is an attempt to disprove absolutist moral realism, I'm afraid it falls far short of the mark. C. S. Lewis (a great defender of this philosophy. Just read "The Abolition of Man") said, "A nation's moral outlook is just so much of its share in eternal Moral Wisdom as its history, economics etc. lets through. In the same way, the voice of the Announcer is just so much of a human voice as the receiving set lets through. Of course, it varies with the state of the receiving set, and deteriorates as the set wears out and vanishes altogether if I throw a brick at it. It is conditioned by the apparatus but not originated by it. If it were - if we knew that there was no human being at the microphone - we should not attend to the news."

@Tundro Walker: I think you are the one confusing fairness and kindness. A guy with a multi-billion dollar corporation can be as selfish and unkind as you like, that doesn't mean he's not fair. If he engages in business with strangers from another country and everything gets distributed in accordance to both parties' efforts and involvement that's being fair. If he tried to get more than his share, that's being unfair and gets punished by possible partners not wanting to do business with him in the future. This is not about how kind people are or how much they give away, but about how people behave in an economic environment with an accountable item (money). Considering that oneself being very rich and another person being very poor is unfair so you must give him part of your wealth, even if that person didn't contribute at all to get it, is a whole different issue.

I think another issue unaddressed are underlying assumptions. Is there any tangible benefit, in this game, to being fair or unfair?

If they're playing with hypothetical money, there's a whole different set of approaches than if they're dealing with real money. E.g., if they have $100 hypothetical dollars, then people feel free to do whatever; it's just a study. If, however, their pay for the study comes out of a $100 set people will react differently.

In the first case, I would tend to expect people to act acharacteristically; either more or less fair, depending on their temperment etc. In the second, I would expect an increase in fairness in general, and especially where there's a punishment (no money for anyone) option. Also, do the gamers meet face-to-face, or is this a faceless transaction (are they being (un)fair to a perceptively real person or no)?

Last, does religion have an effect because of their (professed) beliefs, or because they belong to a community (religious or otherwise)? What's the correlation between, say, sports clubs and fairness?

If this is an attempt to disprove absolutist moral realism, I'm afraid it falls far short of the mark. C. S. Lewis (a great defender of this philosophy. Just read "The Abolition of Man") said, "A nation's moral outlook is just so much of its share in eternal Moral Wisdom as its history, economics etc. lets through.

It's not an attempt to disprove anything, far less something as metaphysical as the existence of a morality intrinsic to the universe.

It's an attempt to investigate the world accessible to our senses. It's science.

You can disagree that the data supports the conclusion, but you have to do so by engaging with the data. Analogies by (erudite, literate, and intelligent) Christian apologists aren't valuable to this conversation.

"Fairness" is a term that has to be agreed upon by the people involved BEFORE it can be measured. A scientist, king, emperor, "expert" cannot enforce fairness on people without it being arbitrary.

Is this before or after you try to justify why you took the bigger share? Fairness is a well defined word. Same benefit for same work. Sadly too big part of the society thinks that they are the only ones entitled to benefits and are worth orders of magnitude more than others (see CEOs and other similar people with overinflated ego).

And by that do you mean same exertion of effort, or same performance of a given task?

Generally effort I would say. Obviously there is some difference based on type of thing being done but that is hardly orders of magnitude difference (especially not in the direction that is usually taken in the capitalist societies).

Generally effort I would say. Obviously there is some difference based on type of thing being done but that is hardly orders of magnitude difference (especially not in the direction that is usually taken in the capitalist societies).

In other words, somebody who absolutely fails at their job and accomplishes nothing deserves equal pay as somebody who performs their job perfectly and outclasses everybody else in productivity because they both spent the same amount of effort? That's pretty unfair of you.

The problem with these studies is that they're looking at people who know they're under examination.

In recent years John List from the University of Chicago has proven the data collected is essentially worthless due to this problem. He took the same test concepts out of the lab and proved that people are much more selfish when they don't know they're being watched. The same people that would be generous in front of a researcher were selfish later or earlier in the same situation in the real world.

Most "social science" is junk science. It is little more than agenda science in many cases, and will be defended or attacked depending on the political needs of the moment. I have observed this hypocrisy countless times when politically incorrect conclusions have been vilified while politically correct conclusions have been trumpeted to prove certain social policies are necessary. It doesn't matter how well-designed the study; hypocrites will attack or defend it based on which axe they're grinding.

Wait, they used fake money (or any kind of money for that matter)? Doesn't that exclude how fairness gets worked out in societies whose commerce is based on barter? If I trade you a cow for four sheep, it's doesn't seem to be immediately quantifiable whether there's a one-to-one mapping of worth as is more conviniently possible with money. And wouldn't this also bring in cultural context since it'd be the only determinant of that worth?

Political fairness isn't the same as fairness in commercial transactions, and it seems that both the article (in mentioning Hobbes and Locke) and the study imply the contrary. Commerce isn't the only sphere that deals in principles of reciprocity and monetary exchange isn't the same as, say, mutual respect or equal rights (you can have a fair commercial exchange with a black in Jim Crow South but there isn't any political fairness to speak of).

We can all take other people's words and make out that they are saying something different, but it doesn't prove anything.

For any simple definition of fairness you can give, it doesn't work in general, and can be trivially attacked via reductio ad absurdum. That was the point of the person he responded to: there is no clear, universal definition of fairness. It's a vague "I'll know it when I see it" principle, at best (and at times you don't necessarily even know it when you see it).

Agree with one of the above posters who said that the very fact that this is a study is a problem for the study.

If people are willing to punish other participants over the sum of money transfered, why should they be unwilling to punish the study itself by bungling up the numbers?

If I feel cheated and I'm angry about it, do I stick to merely punishing the cheater, or do I punish the people who had the power to stop him from cheating too?

I'm not suggesting that this happened in a lot of situations, but if the sincerity of but a few participants is off, the entire thing might crumble.

For instance, people who understand the market well may be able to understand the premise of the study. People from larger, modern societies may also understand the premise of the study better. As a result, the study could become less accurate in those populations if more of them feel the need to punish the researchers.

Finally, the game appears to be quite short. Their way of playing it doesn't take into account the mechanics of the game, since that largely depends on the other players. I want to know if playing the game a lot, thereby making the players better at it, will give different results.

Most "social science" is junk science. It is little more than agenda science in many cases, and will be defended or attacked depending on the political needs of the moment. I have observed this hypocrisy countless times when politically incorrect conclusions have been vilified while politically correct conclusions have been trumpeted to prove certain social policies are necessary. It doesn't matter how well-designed the study; hypocrites will attack or defend it based on which axe they're grinding.

It's all a large scam, and genuflecting before it is foolish.

Hey . . . someone just pronounced a branch of science "all a large scam." Well, because the word "all" is such a strong, convincing one, it must be true. So I don't have to say anything like "Prove that all of it is a scam -- not just a part of it, but all of it."

My personal belief (not a pronouncement) is that some social science can be quite sketchy, while some is solid enough that it adds to our store of knowledge.

A question the study, and these commenter's didn't raise is, are these fundings a cause or an effect? It's exactly this type of willingness to give something up for the benefit of someone else unseen and possibly far away that is a necessity in a forming and maintaining large, integrated and stable nation.

I agree with BBT. Not only are 'tribal' religions just as legitimate as the big three, but the vast differences between them are much greater than Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. If we're making generalizations, we might as well just say 'Abrahamic, and tribal, none'. Religion plays a huge role in what is considered 'right' in a culture, and societal norms influence religion.

Also, was this real money? I think that people would be have very differently if they were just playing for "money". Knowing that no one's really going to get hurt and that you don't stand to gain would really change the way people play the games, as far as I can tell.